Sunday, July 15, 2012

Community Based Energy Efficiency

Pete Street from www.cleanenergydurham.org is an interesting community outreach program for encouraging energy efficiency on a neighborhood basis. It is all about creating a volunteer network and hosting simple DIY energy efficiency training and programs.

from their website:

Pete Street™ creates powerful networks of neighborhood volunteers engaged in saving energy and money. It includes everything needed for a community to fund, organize, implement, and evaluate this successful community building, energy-savings program. Pete Street™ is also a powerful tool to support other energy-savings programs such as assessment-based energy retrofits by providing the on-the-ground outreach that educates and motivates residents to participate and engage in other energy savings activities.

Pete Street™ was developed by nonprofit Clean Energy Durham over five years of training energy volunteers in over 40 diverse neighborhoods in two North Carolina counties: urban Durham County and rural Warren County.

The Pete Street™ approach is simple and effective: learn, do, teach, and track. Neighbors attend a workshop together to learn energy-saving behaviors and techniques. They are encouraged to go home and do some of the techniques they learned, then teach other neighbors and track their savings. Households have documented $100 per month savings with this knowledge.

“Pete” refers to that guy or gal down the block who knows how to install a programmable
thermostat, had the attic insulated, is on a time-of-use utility plan, or has other energy-saving
knowledge to share. The goal is to have as many Petes as possible on every street in America. The
name also allows for playful terms for volunteers such as Energy Pre-Pete™ (learn), Energy Pete™
(do), Energy Re-Pete™ (teach), and Elite Pete™ (take 18-hour training).